How Real Estate Agents Build Lasting Wealth Through Turnkey Investing: Mike Azzam’s Playbook

Most real estate agents spend their careers chasing the next commission check. Mike Azzam thinks that’s leaving the best part of the business on the table. A former registered nurse who traded scrubs for a real estate license, Mike now leads the Azzam Group at RE/MAX Haven Realty, was named Ohio Realtors’ number one individual sales producer in 2019, and has completed more than 500 flips through Azzam Turnkey in Cleveland, Ohio. On this episode of the REI Agent Podcast, he sat down with host Mattias to explain how agents can convert their active sales income into durable, cash-flowing assets — and why the smartest move most agents can make is simply to buy their first property. If you sell homes for a living but haven’t yet used your own industry knowledge to build wealth, this conversation is your roadmap.

Why Should Real Estate Agents Invest Instead of Just Selling?

Mike’s core argument is that agents are sitting on an unfair advantage and most of them never use it. “In any other industry, the knowledge and insight you guys have and information in terms of just knowing what’s coming up, it’d be insider trading,” he told a local panel of colleagues a few years back. Agents see deals first, understand local pricing, and have relationships with lenders, contractors, and title companies. Yet they hand those opportunities to out-of-state investors instead of acting on them.

The reason to invest, in Mike’s framing, isn’t just extra money — it’s a different kind of money. Sales income is active; it stops when you stop working. Rental income keeps arriving. “The holy grail of where I want REI agents to be is to get to a point where they are increasing their lifestyle with their passive income, not with just their sales income,” he said. In that model, your commissions become the fuel that accelerates your investing, while your portfolio quietly builds the freedom that drew most agents to the business in the first place.

That freedom, both Mike and Mattias agreed, is the real prize. Neither of them left their previous careers to get rich overnight — they left to control their time. Investing is what turns a good sales year into a resilient financial foundation that survives market shifts, seasonality, and the inevitable slow months every agent eventually faces.

What Is Turnkey Investing and How Does the BRRRR Model Work?

Azzam Turnkey runs two parallel models, and understanding the difference is key to picking your entry point. In the first, Mike’s team front-loads all the capital: they prospect off-market deals, completely renovate the properties, place tenants, and hold the homes until a turnkey buyer is ready. That buyer gets a one-stop shop — a stabilized, cash-flowing, professionally managed asset they can purchase from across the country while “just sitting from their computer screen, clicking a button.”

The second model is for investors who have some experience and want to force appreciation themselves. Here the buyer brings the capital from day one, and Mike’s team helps them target on- and off-market properties, provides scopes of work and renovation quotes, and manages the rehab and tenant placement remotely. This is the BRRRR method in action — buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat — where the investor recycles their capital out of each deal to fund the next one. “You need to be strategic when you’re scaling your portfolio. You need to scale your capital. You need to find ways to recycle it,” Mike explained.

The lesson for agents is that you don’t have to choose one lane forever. Turnkey is a low-friction way to get your first door. But, as Mike put it, “you can’t buy turnkey forever” — eventually you graduate to adding value yourself, which is where the real capital efficiency and long-term wealth are built.

Are Investment Numbers Still Working With Higher Interest Rates?

This is the question on every agent’s mind, and Mike didn’t sugarcoat it: the math has shifted, but it still works if you shift with it. Back in the 20-teens, his team was buying distressed Cleveland houses for $20,000 to $30,000 and pouring $60,000 to $80,000 into rehab — sometimes with another $50,000 to $60,000 held in city-required escrow. Those extreme numbers are gone. Today he’s buying properties around $140,000 instead of $30,000, and the strategy has adjusted accordingly.

What matters is how much capital you leave trapped in a finished deal. Mike now advises investors to anticipate leaving $10,000 to $15,000 in a property after refinancing, and his team often outperforms that. “Our last refinance, which was I think a month ago, we have about $11K left in the deal — for a house that is fully rehabbed and still cash flowing. In today’s market, that’s a no-brainer home run,” he said. Compared to the 20 to 25 percent down payment plus closing costs a typical buyer would expect on an investment property, leaving eleven grand in a stabilized, income-producing asset is a dramatically better position.

Mike also pushed agents to look past monthly cash flow alone. Real estate professionals can depreciate the asset, accelerate that depreciation, and take bonus depreciation to offset income today — then sell the property whenever they choose, without waiting until retirement age. Between cash flow, tax advantages, tenant-funded principal paydown, and appreciation, he argued the total return is far stronger than the cash-on-cash number suggests. And in his home market specifically, he pushed back on the tired coastal-versus-Midwest stereotype: Cleveland has delivered both. His pro formas assume 2 to 3 percent appreciation, but several neighborhoods have doubled or tripled that.

Why Do “Singles and Doubles” Beat Chasing Home Runs?

If there’s one mindset Mike wants agents to abandon, it’s the obsession with door count. In investor circles, he noted, people “walk around with this badge of how many doors they have” — but the number is nearly meaningless. Ten $30,000 doors are worth a fraction of ten $400,000 doors, yet the door count looks identical. He’s stopped quoting his own door count entirely.

My badge of honor is $35K a month in net passive rental income. That’s my badge of honor. I couldn’t care if it was one door or a thousand doors that got me to that number.

The deeper problem is that chasing home runs paralyzes new investors. “The biggest misconception I hear from investors is, I want to get to 50 doors, I want to get to 10K a month,” Mike said. “It’s like, let’s get to one first. It’s okay that you don’t have any yet.” Because they’re fixated on a huge back-end goal and demanding a 12 or 15 percent ROI on every deal, they let good, boring, cash-flowing opportunities pass them by. Mike’s prescription is the opposite: “Not everything needs to be a home run. You can hit singles and doubles, get in the game, and start to scale from there.”

For agents who don’t have a pile of cash, Mattias laid out a realistic on-ramp that dovetails with Mike’s philosophy. Start with your own home, convert it to a rental later, tap the equity through a line of credit, and repeat. A base hit every year compounds. Over time that same patient approach can build a seven-figure net worth outside your personal residence — and open doors to more passive vehicles like syndications if you eventually want them.

How Does Construction Knowledge Make You a Better Agent?

One of the most practical takeaways applies even to agents who never buy a single investment property. Mike argued that understanding renovation costs is simply part of doing your job well. “It’s a disservice to your clients if you don’t have any concept of what things cost,” he said. “How do you negotiate? How do you leverage any situation for your clients? How do you strategize?” An agent who can’t tell a seller what upgrades will actually move the needle on ROI — or reassure a buyer that a repair costs $8,000, not the $100,000 everyone loves to throw around — is negotiating blind.

You don’t need to be a contractor. Mike’s bar is reasonable: you should know roughly what it costs to install vinyl plank flooring per square foot, even if you never learn what exterior waterproofing excavation runs. Talk to contractors, research online, and walk through a few renovations. Mattias added that living through the stages of a flip — seeing what a fresh coat of paint does to a “drab” listing — gives you real ammunition to educate and persuade clients.

Mike’s team has turned this knowledge into revenue. Because they built a construction arm to handle investor rehabs, they now offer repair services to retail sellers too. When a listing client needs a few fixes before going to market, the team handles it — capturing both the listing and margin on the repairs. That kind of vertical integration, extended across title, lending, insurance, and cleaning, is how Mike converts expertise into “a win-win” for clients and the business alike.

What’s the Highest-Leverage Habit for Doubling Production?

Asked to name the single highest-leverage habit for an agent who wants to double production over 24 months without burning out, Mike didn’t hesitate: prospecting, and above all, consistency. “How many people did you touch today? How many people are you touching tomorrow?” is a broken record in his office. He compared inconsistent, twice-a-week power-dialing sessions to crash dieting: “I need to lose 10 pounds — not eat for two days. It just doesn’t work.”

The fix is to treat your pipeline like an investment, not a contact list. “Manage your pipeline like it’s an investment,” Mike said — with drip campaigns, action plans, and steady daily touches by email, text, and call. Mattias described running his own touch list every morning, reaching out to just five people a day in a meaningful, relationship-based way using a FORD framework (family, occupation, recreation, dreams). Five a day isn’t insane; the consistency is what compounds.

Mike’s other golden nuggets reinforced the theme: build systems so you can vertically integrate and sustain volume, focus on activity rather than outcomes (“as long as the activity is there, the outcome will follow”), and above all, don’t overcomplicate it. He’s been openly skeptical of shiny AI tools — he scrapped AI-driven calls and texts on his own team because clients could “smell the fake AI,” and both he and Mattias agreed that in a relationship business, genuine human connection is the one thing automation can’t replace.

Keep Building the Life You Want

Mike Azzam’s message to real estate agents is refreshingly grounded: you already have the knowledge, the access, and the relationships to build lasting wealth — you just have to start. Buy one door. Leave a little capital in the deal. Learn what a rehab costs. Prospect consistently. Then let the singles and doubles compound into the kind of passive income that buys back your time.

For the full conversation, including Mike’s take on the Cleveland market’s best current opportunities and his favorite business book, listen to this episode of the REI Agent Podcast wherever you get your shows. And if you’re ready to put these ideas to work in your own business, explore REI Agent Advisor at advisor.reiagent.com for tools and guidance built to help agents turn active income into lasting assets. Until next time, keep building the life you want.

Full transcript: read the complete episode transcript on the episode page.